They just wanted to keep playing flag football.
Tenley Hill had played the fast-growing sport at San Clemente High School, and Alia Pasternak had done so at Huntington Beach High. Then they graduated in 2025, and each realized that while the sport was exploding in popularity among girls at the high school level, it was to that point nonexistent on the campuses where they were headed.
Read more Iranian advisers helped Houthis seize Yemen’s Red Sea coast in less than 48 hours, sources tell AP
So Hill, at UCLA, and Pasternak, at USC, pretty much created it themselves.
Now sophomores, they lead their respective club teams, but playing – in a season that will begin in January with an event held in conjunction with the College Football Playoff championship game in Las Vegas – is the easy part.
“I feel like I’m working a job,” Hill said.
This was a DYI project in many respects. Hill made the first inquiries on her campus in the fall of 2025, asking club sports director Brett Billet what it would take to start a flag football team.
Then she “immediately just started working on all the things he told me, like getting officers, getting funding, hosting tryouts, getting approved,” she said. “And I did those as fast as possible.
“Usually it takes about two quarters to a year to get approved but I was like, ‘We’re gonna do this in one quarter.’ And we did, so we were able to start on my very first year here at UCLA.”
And she did this while a full-time student and varsity cheerleader.
“It was definitely a lot,” she said. “I had to find all the coaches. I had to find all of our players, host tryouts. I had to reach out to other teams in order to schedule games because at that point we weren’t part of a league.”
Meanwhile, USC freshman Pasternak had the same yearning to continue with the sport she had played in high school.
“I fell in love with it,” Pasternak said. “It was such a fun environment, everybody coming together to learn a new sport, because many girls have never played flag football before. Before flag football, I was a track athlete.”
And, shortly after arriving on campus, she saw a UCLA flag football Instagram page.
“I immediately DM’d the Instagram,” she said. “I gave Tenley my number. I was like, ‘Let’s talk,’ and from there a really amazing friendship blossomed.”
They compared notes and, on parallel tracks, set out to extend an ancient intercollegiate rivalry in a new sport.
“There’s a lot that I did behind the scenes,” Pasternak said. “Organizing carpools, talking with the coaches, planning our schedule, planning what games we’re gonna have, locking down the facilities, communicating with other teams. I remember Tenley asked me, ‘What coaching application did you (use)? And I showed her the Google form.
“In our little makeshift conference with UCLA, USC, Long Beach (State), Cal Poly SLO, Berkeley (and) San Diego State, we were all sharing resources, I made a group chat and we were just trying to help each other out so we could be able to play each other.”
Year 2 should be easier off the field. NIRSA (the acronym stands for National Intramural-Recreational Sports Association) will provide organizational help, with the idea of enabling the club athletes to have something approximating the varsity experience. In partnership with the NFL, it has created a flag football league that will lead to a national championship tournament next April.
NIRSA has been in existence for 75 years and has been involved with flag football for 45 of those, but flag football manager Nik Sandona said the explosion of interest at the high school level – “it’s grown from 15,000 to over 100,000 in the last five years alone,” he said – has led to a similar expansion among colleges.
“We want to be able to provide structured opportunities for the club teams, that allow the universities that don’t (field flag football as) varsity sports yet to be able to provide them a similar quality of experience, to where they can play a real schedule, so they can play rivalry games … (and) also give them the same experience that a varsity athlete would (have).”
Read more Congo is running short of health workers as Ebola remains out of control, WHO says
And given that flag football will be a part of the 2028 Olympic program in L.A., it only makes sense that the L.A. schools are part of NIRSA’s league.
The partnership with the NFL also has other advantages. The Chargers made $10,000 donations to both the USC and UCLA programs last spring, and the teams played each other last season at the team’s facility in El Segundo.
Last season, the Bruins and Trojans as fledgling clubs had been part of a loose confederation with Cal Poly (SLO), Long Beach State, San Diego State and Cal.
The number of schools that field flag football teams continues to grow. In this region it includes including Hope International, Redlands, Azusa Pacific, La Sierra, Simpson University (Redding), Cal Lutheran, Cal Poly Pomona, UC San Diego, California Baptist, Biola and the Claremont Colleges. Additionally, community colleges including Citrus, Irvine Valley, Cypress, East L.A. and Norco will field teams.
NIRSA might ultimately relieve the clubs’ student leaders of some of the organizational burden, but for Hill, Pasternak and students on other campuses who have helped launch flag teams, the initial experience is essentially an internship in sports management, only without the class credit.
It can be a crash course in sports business principles, too.
Club programs, Sandona said, “are funded through student fees, so their budgets really can vary. Some teams don’t get budgets at all, so they have to then fundraise a lot of their money.”
Hill said the UCLA club receives “some assistance” from the school’s club sports program, and the donation from the Chargers was “super helpful, just because I think the NFL is super excited to see this growing as well and they want to help in any way they can.” But the players have to pay dues as well, though she said a lot of them fundraise those dues from crowdfunding and donations.
“We’re kind of just holding out hope for an angel donor to come along and sponsor the team so that we can be varsity, because that’s our biggest dream,” she said. “… I never knew because I only really just played, but it’s definitely really expensive to operate the team.”
USC’s team collected dues, as well, but the launch last year was complicated, Pasternak said: “They lost our email (address). So that delayed our bank account exponentially and then we couldn’t collect dues for half the season. … There’s an order to things, and we were trying to go as fast as we could within university policy.”
But she said she’s grateful for the opportunity to “operate USC women’s flag football as not only a team but as a business. Someone told me, ‘Alia, you’re an entreprenur, why don’t you pursue that?’ And I’m studying business with a minor in sport media industry, so I’m grateful that my studies are intersecting with a hands-on prospect, that I’m actually gaining really valuable experience (at) running my own business.”
No class credit, she added, “but it is a great add-on to the resume, obviously. … I get exposure to all different aspects, from the finance side of it to communications to PR and what it means to have our brand and our marketing aspect. I get a little taste of everything in our one club.”
There’s also this: They’ll compete between the lines, for sure, but away from the field this Bruin and this Trojan are working together to make this project succeed.
“Alia Pasternak and I have worked hand in hand through this entire process,” Hill said. “Since the very beginning, we’ve just been helping each other to start our own programs and also using that rivalry to our advantage in order to get more interest and stuff for our teams. And usually when we play, that’s the most views our account gets and that’s the most interest it generates.
“Honestly, we’ve just been working really hard to get both of our leagues and both of our teams the recognition they deserve.”
So in this case – off the field, anyway – “Fours up” and “Fight on” mean the same thing. When they work together, both are stronger.
Read more Pakistani officials say Afghan Taliban shelled Pakistan’s border posts. Kabul denies the attack